PEACE IN MIND

Reviewed by Aharon Klieman, a professor of political science at Tel-Aviv University, visiting professor at the University of Chicago and author of "Israel & the World After Forty YearsCHICAGO TRIBUNE

This Side of Peace

A Personal Account

By Hanan Ashrawi

Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $25

Battling for Peace

A Memoir

By Shimon Peres

Random House, 384 pages, $25

Conventional wisdom about conflict resolution sees the peacemaker's greatest challenge in just getting the warring parties to the bargaining table. Hence the sigh of collective relief from the international community now that Israelis and Palestinians at long last have started to address each other as indispensable partners in the quest for peace.

What Hanan Ashrawi refers to as this "new discourse" began warily at the 1991 Madrid conference and was dramatically upgraded by the 1993 joint PLO-Rabin government declaration of principles and mutual recognition, announced at Oslo and signed in President Clinton's presence on the White House lawn. Since then, however, an appreciable loss of both momentum and goodwill cautions that in the very act of addressing each other the two sides may actually be talking past each other. In which case, conflict resolution theories notwithstanding, a definitive solution to this bitter, seemingly interminable and mutually tragic Middle East territorial feud is anything but assured. This nagging suspicion is reinforced by otherwise commendable autobiographies from two direct participants in the recent breakthrough Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

Masters of both the spoken and the written word, Ashrawi and Shimon Peres share impeccable credentials as highly effective spokespersons in competing for American and world opinion on behalf of their respective Arab and Jewish nationalist causes. And their political memoirs make an invaluable contribution to our deeper understanding of the current peace dynamic by treating it as two-dimensional.

As they narrate the human and personal side of Mideast statecraft, which standard textbooks tend to ignore, both authors detail the ceaseless tactical maneuvering that goes on as expected between opposing forces locked in diplomatic combat. Moreover, their thumbnail sketches of the leading figures within the rival Arab and Zionist camps show admirable candor .

Indicting close associates as unsparingly as they do former sworn enemies, they speak of the behind-the-scenes dissension and infighting that more often than not has taken place simultaneously inside their respective delegations. Whether all this internal confrontation and conflict is owing to personal rivalries and power struggles or to ideological, strategic and tactical differences, what Ashrawi and Peres have to say certainly ought to dispel any lingering notion that there is a monolithic "Zionist entity" or a simplistic position held by "the Arabs."

But here the similarities between the authors end. Foreign minister Peres, whose long public career parallels the eventful first half-century of modern Israel, was, and remains, a central decisionmaker. Ashrawi, by contrast, filled a limited, supporting role, holding center stage only briefly in the early 1990s, until she was marginalized by loyalists of PLO chairman Yassir Arafat. Therefore, unlike Peres, she writes as an authentic although no longer authoritative voice of the Palestinians.

For Ashrawi, the period of the Madrid and subsequent Washington talks serves as the centerpiece; for Peres they were a brief sideshow and merely the prelude, or pretext, for Oslo. While Ashrawi appears for the moment to have been left behind by history, Peres seems bent upon getting ahead of contemporary events in espousing his visionary blueprint of a "new Middle East."

His message is definitely upbeat, if not euphoric, whereas Ashrawi sounds a pessimistic note about prospects for peace as well as for enlightened, democratic Palestinian self-rule. Indeed, the critical point of departure for both autobiographers may well be highly ironic. Engaging in undisguised criticism of Arafat, Ashrawi consciously distances herself from the present PLO leadership; it is the Peresites who have made themselves dependent upon Arafat's grudging cooperation and political survival.

Peres' long-awaited retrospective does not disappoint, especially its first 280 pages. Singularly interesting are his reflections upon strained interpersonal and working relationships. Of Golda Meir, he confides that their relations were "always complex and ambivalent, and usually unhappy" and attributes his membership on her "hate list" to his alleged conduct of separate and secret foreign policies. Indeed, this penchant for undertaking solo initiatives becomes a constant refrain; similar charges of insubordination leveled against Peres later would poison his ties with premiers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

For example, of clandestine talks in London with King Hussein in 1987, Peres writes: "As the long, frustrating months of diplomacy grew into years, I decided to cut through the complicated and necessarily slow-moving machinery of shuttle diplomacy and try to reach a breakthrough by means of a secret summit." Adding insult to injury, he then flatly refused to share with, let alone even show, Prime Minister Shamir the secret draft accord reached with the Jordanian monarch. On troubled relations with Rabin, Peres comments judiciously, "I have accusations of my own and detailed rebuttals to his, but now it is either too early or too late to go into the old struggles."

By comparison, Ashrawi is far less reticent and for this can be forgiven her obviously partisan and at times florid description of the agonies of Palestinian nation-building under Israeli rule. In the last analysis what redeems her work is that she combines passionate advocacy with unsparing, diagnostic self-criticism.

Looking back in disillusionment upon the last seven years of "high drama and farce" she ponders "How did our dreams shrivel and our vision blur" and then cites a close colleague, West Bank leader Faisal Husseini: "We carried out our mission faithfully. Perhaps that was our flaw."

Surely another was naivete; in her own words, "A group of professionals and intellectuals, we were plucked from our offices, clinics, and libraries to wrestle . . . in the intricate machinations of the politics of sterility." Nor did it help that these Palestinian pilgrims, suddenly raised to prominence in the uncharted terrain of peacemaking, lacked the two prerequisites necessary for success: a firm mandate and an independent power base. In contending with Arafat's Tunis-based "outsiders," Ashrawi's team may have been "insiders"--that is, West Bank and Gaza notables--but not infighters.

Final betrayal came at Oslo, which Ashrawi faults both on procedural and substantive grounds. She and the official Palestinian delegation were laboring in earnest at the Washington talks when the surprise announcement was made of an Israeli-PLO reconciliation; totally uninformed and therefore discredited, in effect they had been bypassed and used as a subterfuge for the secret Oslo channel.

Moreover, Ashrawi pronounces the actual document itself seriously flawed. In yet another grand irony, echoing her close friend and mentor, Columbia University professor Edward Said, she and other so-called moderates castigate Arafat for being too compromising toward Israel. Rather than appreciating the Oslo agreement for opening a genuine "window of opportunity" that made possible unprecedented Palestinian self-rule, they persist in seeing only the agreement's immediate shortcomings and what was not achieved--indeed, could not possibly have been achieved in the circumstances prevailing in 1993.

Compromised between, on the one hand, PLO bureaucrats and, on the other, Islamic militants whose worldview makes no allowance for negotiation and compromise, Ashrawi drew the only logical conclusion. Seeking a "graceful exit," she resigned her post, but not before a dramatic encounter with Arafat at which she berated him for "stabbing us in the back, casting doubt on our integrity and abilities" and insisted "We are not regimented soldiers carrying out orders blindly."

Returning to family and private life in Ramallah, she founded and now heads the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights, a watchdog body intent upon holding Arafat and his Palestinian Authority accountable.

Despite going their separate ways, and despite their fundamental differences, by chronicling their wealth of practical experience Hanan Ashrawi and Shimon Peres reunite in providing one further indispensable and timely service. Read together, these two sets of memoirs remind us that in the specific instance of Arab-Israeli peacemaking there are neither shortcuts nor easy roads ahead.